December 29, 2014

Why You Need A Strategy

Here at Ad Contrarian Global Headquarters, we're in our final week of year-end reruns. Today we reach back to September for this oldie about ad strategy. Next week we return, 5 pounds heavier, with new things to whine about.

In the 1950's, the western powers devised a strategy to deal with the
threat they perceived from the communist world. The strategy was called
"containment."

In dumb-ass blogger terms, containment
was essentially this: we'll let the communist block exist but we won't
let it grow through military means.

This strategy informed the decisions western powers made and gave them a basis for deciding what to do and what not to do.

The
strategy had its tactical successes (Cuban Missile Crisis) and its
tactical failures (Vietnam War), but in the end it succeeded in
accomplishing its two primary goals: avoiding nuclear war, and
staunching the spread of communism.

Today the western
powers also perceive a threat. The threat is from jihadist extremists.
The difference today is that the west has no strategy. Every challenge
is dealt with ad hoc. There is no unifying principle that gives
rise to a strategy. The result is that just 8 weeks ago we were
contemplating arming the Syrian rebels, and today we are bombing them.

Because
we have no strategy, we are not clear on what our objectives are or
what we are trying to do; we have not defined who our friends are and
who our enemies are, and the result is a confused policy with too many
failures and no definition of success.

Don't worry, this post is not about politics. It's about marketing.

An
analogy can be drawn to most marketing. One of the disheartening
effects of the proliferation of media options has been the ascent of
tactics and the decline of strategy.

Far too many
brands are buying into the nonsense of "360° marketing" which is code
for trying to be everywhere. 360˚ marketing is not a strategy. It is
absence of a strategy. As David Ogilvy said, "The essence of strategy is
sacrifice."

Second
is that the tactical drives out the strategic. Each media type is
assigned its own objective. And as each media type is optimized for that
objective, it gets a little farther from what's going on in every other
medium. Like our stellar universe, the brand universe keeps expanding.
Each initiative moves farther away from every other one.

There
is only one way to avoid this. Have a simple strategy, be clear on what
it is, and make sure everything you are doing conforms to this
strategy.

And remember, it is better to do three things well than thirty things half-assed.

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"Creative people make the ads. Everyone else makes the arrangements."

"Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

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"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

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"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."